Thoughts & Deeds

September means Bike Commute Challenge month in Portland – a month in which the Bicycle Transportation Alliance and the city promote bike commuting by encouraging friendly competition between individuals at local businesses to see who can bike the most in the month. It’s a great idea, especially for larger companies that draw a lot of employees who drive into town from suburbs (or even near-town neighborhoods). … more

Last Friday I had the excellent opportunity to talk to interactive industry colleagues about something near and dear to my liver heart – homebrewing. I served five kinds of homebrew to warm up the crowd, then dropped an amazing 17 minutes of blabbing about beer on their unwitting ears. People were kind enough to laugh at my dorky jokes, too! What nice folks we have in Portland. … more

These are trying times. The economy is in a downturn, the war in Iraq lingers on, gas costs over $4 a gallon, and large businesses in America are losing money. At times like this, I think back to WWII and the efforts of the government and businesses to bolster the economy, how they encouraged thrift, recycling, reusing old materials, growing Victory gardens, tightening the belt a little. (Of course, the flip side to this was a series of posters villianizing Germans and Japanese.) I think of the heroic posters that helped shape graphic design as a profession and of the designers who created these posters. … more

When I decided I wanted to be a designer, I was going out on a limb. The year was 1997, and I’d just completed my bachelor’s degree in English, had no design experience, and had only created one (very hideous) web site. Back then, Amazon.com was still in its infancy and I wasn’t even sure there would be a job for me in this “new media” field. What I did know is that visual communication was exciting, I enjoyed tinkering around with HTML, and I was pretty good at learning new technologies. … more

I always wanted to be a teacher. Ok, not always, since I also wanted to be a ninja or a breakdancer. But starting in high school and going in to college, the plan was to be an English teacher. Since turning into a designer, I’ve either wanted to go to graduate school or teach. I only want to go to grad school when work stops being challenging and fun, but the idea of teaching sticks with me even when work is busy and exciting. … more

After going to the annual Web Visions conference here in Portland, I started thinking about the future of interactive design as a discipline. Who are we and what are we doing?

Things have changed so much since I created my first web page in 1996 back when I hand-coded everything using emacs. Now there’s real design on the web. Sure, there’s a lot of “bad” design out there, but it doesn’t hold a candle to the smorgasbord of animated GIFs, blinking text, and ugly background textures that made up the entirety of your web experience a decade ago. … more